Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar’s desert coming-of-age thriller Theeb at times plays like a corrective to Lawrence of Arabia. It’s set in 1916, during World War I, when the Arabian Peninsula was still under Ottoman rule and the British were working with local tribes to overthrow them. You wouldn’t really know these geopolitics from looking at the film, though: Told from the point of view of a young bedouin boy, this tale unfolds very much in the timeless, spare world of the desert. But these are not the sensuously undulating, lunar dunes of David Lean’s masterpiece; rather, the desert in Theeb feels intimate, rough, real. You can run your hands through the sand and feel the flies on your face. That realism extends to the characters as well, thankfully. Living in the desert, Theeb (Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat) and his older brother Hussein (Hussein Salameh Al-Sweilhiyeen) are the sons of a recently departed,...
- 11/7/2015
- by Bilge Ebiri
- Vulture
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